The Redistributive Land Reforms Bill, 2010, seems to have come as an afterthought. It has come at a time when many are convinced that the time for land reforms has passed. But the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which has presented the bill, feels it is committed to end feudalism and redistribution of existing land is the best way to go about it.

The MQM, essentially a representative of the landless people of urban centres of Sindh, is being criticised both by the opponents and supporters of land reforms. While the opponents feel the MQM is incapable of appreciating that land is a source of income for the people, the supporters think genuine land reforms cannot be effected in the absence of a strong social movement which is "missing at the moment." By not becoming a part of a social mobilisation campaign on the issue, the MQM fell short of expectations. At best, these people say, the MQM will use the bill as a bargaining chip with the PPP which is "dominated by the feudals".

Criticisms apart, there are no great hopes attached with the bill which may only take up some newspaper space before it is shelved for good.

Sad as it may seem, the issue of land reforms is not destined to go beyond the level of debate: Sad because all saner voices believe that land reforms have a direct bearing on the development of this country. Sad because the Planning Commission report in mid-fifties highlighted the social, economic and political need for land reforms in no uncertain terms. According to the report, the land reforms were supposed to achieve "greater productivity, higher living standards, and improved social status and opportunities for those engaged in cultivation."

Sad because economic thinkers like Dr Akmal Hussain, who have concluded that lack of access to land and an exploitative landlord-tenant relationship is the principal source of rural poverty, now advocate agrarian reforms instead because taking away land from big landlords "is not politically advisable".

The MQM bill may be ill-fated but the bottomline is that people are alive to the issues confronting this country and its people. People like Akmal Hussain have suggested solutions in the shape of small farms etc. It is time the government paid heed to these solutions to drag people out of their poverty.

Ghulam Ali Leghari, 50, is landless peasant (hari) in district Sanghar, having a large family of nine members. He himself is in a bad shape; however, he has taken upon himself the voluntary work of helping fellow peasants particularly in settling accounts with landlords who cheat them (haris) or do not pay them.

About six months ago, Ghulam Ali contacted this scribe, asking for help in the recovery of the outstanding amount for an influential landlord in Sanghar. The said landlord, son of a literary figure of Sindh, was not paying to the family of a hari Bharo Bheel. It may be mentioned here that Sanghar, located at the heart of Sindh, is under the strong control of the feudal lords and, therefore, it sees virtually no uprising by the haris.

The last time Ghulam Ali called was a few days back when he wanted to find out details about the government's scheme of land distribution among the haris. He was keen to know about the process so that he would be able to help the local haris in getting allotment of the land. "Believe me, the people are coming to me every day and I have to tell them specifically about it," he explained.

Ghulam Ali sounded quite anxious. A little inquiring helped reveal that he had misunderstood a news item carried by the local journals regarding a bill that had been submitted in the National Assembly by the mainly-urban-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), on Oct 12. The poor peasant had wrongly assumed that a law had been passed.

He also expressed his doubts about Bharo Bheel being a scheduled caste minority group, which meant that he could not benefit from the scheme.

Ghulam Ali is not the only person who was excited by the MQM's proposed 'political venture'; there are millions of landless people in the country, especially in rural Sindh, who would look at any such move as a beacon of hope.

The bill, titled "Redistributive Land Reforms Bill, 2010" proposes restricted landholdings. It also proposes that each family should be allowed to own a maximum of 30 acres of irrigated or 54 acres of arid (barani) land. Besides, it seeks the abolition of hereditary ownership of lands. For its part, the MQM considers its bill in line with the party's recent policy on feudal structure. It proposes that the land surrendered after holding the upper ceiling should be distributed among the landless.

"We want to bring an end to feudalism and the best way to do so is to redistribute the existing land," says Kanwar Khalid Younis, a central leader of MQM. "If we want to see change in the lives of the poor people then we have to make such bold decisions."

According to him, the ball is now in the court of the two major political parties in the parliament whether or not they "support" the bill, "though there is little chance that the present parliament will do so, since it consists mostly of feudals themselves."

Land is a major issue in Pakistan and many people attribute the country's lack of development to the concentration of land among the privileged few. According to the Agricultural Census 2000, nearly half of rural households did not own any land; thus, they are condemned to a life in abject poverty.

Another lot of population comprises landless peasants or haris who work as sharecroppers and are vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. This is a largely marginalised group which is caught in the web of a feudal structure that makes them socially, politically and economically dependent.

Historically, the issue of land distribution has been up for debate since the inception of the country. First land reforms were introduced in 1959 during Ayub Khan's era, followed by another reforms in 1972 by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Though Bhutto's land reforms, an extension of Ayub's, received a popular support and took Bhutto's stocks higher among the poor masses, they did not serve to bring any remarkable change in the pattern of landholdings.

"Each time the land reforms failed because of their inherent leniencies for the landlords," says Syed Mohammad Ali, an independent expert on land rights in Pakistan.

In his view, fixing the upper level of land on an individual family member rather than on a family was the main drawback of the land reforms. "Though the upper level of land holding was brought down to 150 acres in case of irrigated land, many landlords escaped surrendering the land," he adds.

The reforms failed to reduce land concentration as only 7 to 10 percent of land was reclaimed and distributed among the haris. Later, the takeover of additional land by the state was challenged in the Federal Shariat court and, eventually, in Supreme Court. Both the courts declared such action as repugnant to Islamic principles. This was in 1989. The court verdicts virtually halted the process of land reforms in Pakistan. The submission of the draft bill in the National Assembly by the MQM has re-initiated the debate on the issue. Just how serious (read sincere) is MQM in taking this important bill forward shall be gauged in the future sessions of the Upper House as some political analysts believe it is only a gimmick to gain media attention.

"Why would MQM be interested in land reforms?" asks Shah Jehan Shah, a landlord from district Matyari, when prompted for a comment. "Why don't they talk about concentration of wealth in the cities? Why not distribute industries among the poor? Why just land?"

In contrast to the reaction of landlords, social scientists and intellectuals in Sindh have a rather more cautious stance on the proposed bill. "Genuine land reforms can only be brought if it is made a part of a strong social movement; that's missing at the moment," says Rauf Nizamani, a Sindhi intellectual, talking to TNS. "If MQM was sincere in its initiative it would have first concentrated on social mobilisation instead of going directly into the assembly."

Nizamani agrees that the feudal structure which rests on big land holdings is a major socio-economic issue for the country and that any major change in the setup could only be expected through a distribution of assets. He also says MQM's initiative is without proper homework and consultation with all stakeholders. "I doubt if MQM will get anything out of it besides using it as a bargaining chip with PPP, the ruling party which is dominated by feudals."

The viewpoints of both Shah and Nizamani are understandable, given Sindh's socio ethnic scenario. The politics of Sindh is ethnically motivated and most good government initiatives become a prey to this. Therefore, it may be necessary to see the issue of land reforms in that context.

The government and various development agencies are talking about the issue of resettlement and rehabilitation of the flood affectees. Interestingly, the debate has centred on building homes for the shelterless people besides rebuilding the infrastructure -- schools, hospitals, bridges and roads -- but there is little focus on issues such as these people's entitlement to land.

A study shows that almost all the poor flood victims are landless. Even those lucky few who have their own houses do not possess entitlement of the land. They are settled either on the state or the private land; in both cases, without any documented ownership title, and are all under an ever present threat of eviction.

A sincere rehabilitation/resettlement moot shall have to accompany a piece of land for cultivation and shelter. Rural families can survive on a minimum of 5 acres of land, leave alone 12 acres or 25 acres as mentioned in the government policy books. So, if the state is willing, it must reconsider the proposal by providing each family a piece of land on ownership basis.

There are large pieces of state land lying vacant or forcibly occupied by the influential. The latter can be immediately recovered and redistributed as part of the resettlement package.

A better way would be to start with the katcha land. This year's floods have brought to light the fact that individuals have occupied as much as 5,000 acres of katcha land and they annexed the state land into their own. It is high time the government restored the state writ and recovered this land from the clutches of the big landlords and then redistribute it among the flood affectees.

-- Zulfiqar Shah

The News on Sunday: Do you think this is an appropriate time to plan land reforms? Not in terms of revision of land holdings but also in terms of social justice to the landless farmers?

Dr Akmal Hussain: The greatest potential for increasing yield per acre lies in the small farm sector because today this sector (farms below 25 acres) constitutes about 60 percent of the total farm area and 94 per cent of the total number of farms, which makes it a substantive part of the agrarian economy. The majority of farms in this sector are operated by poor tenants that neither have the ability nor the incentive to invest in increasing the yield per acre, because they know that half of their profit will go to the landlord. Its yield potential is largely underutilised. Now, if we could enable this small farm sector to actualise its potential it could become the cutting-edge of a new growth process with higher and more equitable agriculture growth.

Land reform attempts in the past such as in 1958, 1973 and 1977 which specified land ownership in terms of individual rather than family holdings failed to substantially change the land ownership distribution. So that agriculture land ownership continues to remain highly skewed. The greatest potential for increasing yield per acre and value-added agriculture lies in the small farm sector. Therefore, on grounds of both growth and equity, it's all the more important to shift from the elite farmer strategy that we've had since the days of Green Revolution, about four decades ago, to new strategy of growth led by small farmers.

TNS: What should be the first step towards land reforms?

AH: I am an advocate of agrarian reforms in the current situation. Today, land reforms conceived in terms of the more radical meaning -- that is, forcibly taking land away from big landlords and giving it to landless tenants -- are not politically advisable. This will create a high degree of social conflict and violence in the rural sector. Nowhere in the world a forcible transition has been peaceful; not even China and Russia. I don't advocate that kind of forcible transfer of land because Pakistan is already confronting the gravest and multi-faceted crisis of state, society and economy. So for the sake of the country and its people you do not want another dimension of violence and stress on state and society.

TNS: So, how can we transfer land to the tiller through a peaceful process, an effective small farmer strategy?

AH: That's a challenge. I suggest the 2.6 million acres of cultivatable agriculture land owned by the state be divided into five-acre packages and distributed among the tenants operating on less than 25 acres of land, free of charge. By doing so, 58 per cent of the tenant farmers who are currently landless will become land owners.

To enable the rest of the 42 percent of the tenant farmers to buy land, a credit fund worth $4.5billion be created through a consortium of government, donors and commercial banks. State land can be sold to the interested farmers at current cultivable land prices. Land becomes collateral that the farmer returns as loan to the lender. This way the tenancy problem would be solved, and the objective of land to the tiller achieved peacefully rather than through violence.

TNS: How will this ensure agriculture growth?

AH: In order to ensure productivity, increase the acquisition of land ownership by tenants. I suggest initiating a public-private partnership in the shape of the Small Farmers Development Corporation (SFDC) with small farmers being the equity holders while this public limited company would be managed by professionals. Again, loans could be provided to small farmers for purchasing the equity and repayment could be made on the basis of the dividends earned from the equity. The Corporation will help them develop land, provide high quality seeds, fertilisers and pesticides etc; provide farmers with modern technology to increase the yields and to shift to higher value products; and help them to market the produce within the country and, if possible, also internationally.

The bottom line is that instead of treating the poor as recipients of handouts you make them subjects of the process of growth -- by giving them access to and control over productive assets. This would be growth for the people by the people. That's what I call economic democracy.

TNS: Do you agree that the solution lies in breaking the stronghold of the feudal over the voiceless haris?

AH: Pakistan's landed elite cannot be called feudal. It invests, hires labour and generates profit, uses modern technology and is, therefore, capitalistic. There is capitalism in agriculture. However, the old feudal relations have been restructured in the service of capital. The landlords often retain a part of their landholding in the form of tenant farms so that they have a tied source of cheap labour at planting and harvest time. The tenants are often tied to the landlord through debt and are in many cases obliged to work for the landlords at less than market wage rate or no wage at all. Therefore, certain feudal/social relationships prevail within the framework of capitalist agriculture.

This feudal/social culture permeates our political setup. The landlord in some cases embodies the power of the local state. He is the arbiter of right and wrong. He humiliates and punishes his 'serfs' if his authority is challenged. Often the woman's body is used as the terrain where the landlord's power is manifested and established. This is peculiar to feudal culture.

Likewise, in politics, the government-opposition relationship is an aspect of feudal culture, where the opponent must be humiliated and eliminated. Similarly, high quality education is the prerogative of the rich, so is safe drinking water, recourse to justice and healthcare. There's one Pakistan for the rich and another for the poor. The fact that we are able to banish the poor to a life of wretchedness and humility is peculiar to feudal culture.

TNS: You are suggesting the wellbeing of the poor farmer is not the focus of the feudal elite. How can a change be brought about in their thinking?

AH: In order to replace feudal traits with democratic attributes, the poor must be empowered. In my view, Pakistan needs economic democracy to sustain political democracy, because we cannot have political democracy in a situation where we have created an economic apartheid. For the last 63 years, our country's elite have combined rapacity with incompetence. They also lack an understanding of their best interest, which is to avoid a breakdown of law and order that could occur as a result of mass economic deprivation and injustice.

Presently, we are experiencing a reaction against persistent mass poverty, gross social and economic inequality and lack of access over justice. Take the Taliban movement which is in reaction to an economic apartheid state; provincial nationalism in Sindh and Balochistan; and incipient anarchism (remember the current Karachi killings, recent case of lynching in Sialkot or stoning women to death). The fact is if the state is unable to provide the minimum conditions of civilised life, it loses its legitimacy -- that is the right to rule. In Pakistan's case, this legitimacy has been weakened.

Today, if this elite is to wake up, it should know that Pakistan as a state is in a danger. This elite must also know it has no future without Pakistan. So, to have a future for themselves they have to do something for Pakistan. Hence, it is important to ensure agrarian reform. The future is now dependent on empowering small farmers.

-- Alefia T. Hussain, Aoun Sahi & Naila Inayat

Land reform was one of the principal objectives of the movement for Pakistan, although the party leading the struggle for a separate state for the Muslims of India – the All-India Muslim League – was manifestly divided over the issue.

The peasants in the territories that were to become part of Pakistan certainly had visions of relief from land hunger. They saw much hope in the declarations the Muslim League leaders made off and on, especially in statements such as the one Quaid-i-Azam made at the party's annual session in Delhi in 1943. In this address, the Quaid refused to have a Pakistan where the landlords could continue to wickedly subject the peasants and tenants to unbridled exploitation.

At the same time, a large number of big landlords, especially in Punjab and Sindh, had joined the League not only in the hope of recovering the lands they had mortgaged with moneylenders but also to prevent the party from offering the tillers of the soil a fair deal.

Still, in Punjab where the decisive battle for Pakistan was going to be fought, the provincial Muslim League was obliged to put special emphasis on land reform in its manifesto for the 1946 election. In Sindh, the plight of the landless haris had attracted sufficient attention to make the formation of a committee to probe the situation unavoidable.

One of the unwanted consequences of Partition was that big landlords acquired greater power in the new state of Pakistan than they had enjoyed in the undivided British India. However, it was impossible for them to avoid doing something to alleviate the misery of the landless hordes. The Pakistan Muslim League, therefore, set up an Agrarian Committee, headed by a wily landlord, Mumtaz Daultana, who was acquiring a reputation for doublespeak. The committee's report of 1949 said, in the Daultana language, the embedded journalists of those days used to rave about:

"… an equitable and prosperous land system in Western Pakistan must be founded on a State-regulated ownership of holdings by self-cultivating peasant farmers, coupled with the economic enlargement of the size of holdings, promotion of scientific methods of intensive farming and cooperation in various aspects of agriculture through the intervention of village communities. This must involve the gradual elimination from our economy of landlordism and all superior but idle interests in land above the actual cultivator".

The report of the Agrarian Committee was allowed to gather dust on the shelf and its fate was shared by the Sindh Hari Committee report (especially Masud Khaddarposh's note of dissent). An open revolt by the holy defenders of feudalism offered the provincial governments an excuse to shift the debate from the need to liquidate feudalism to a revision of tenancy laws. Meanwhile, the East Bengal government was quick to see the advantage in taking land away from non-Muslim (mostly) owners and creating new Muslim landlords.

However, the idea of land reform received fulsome support from the authors of the first five-year plan, led by Zahid Husain, who declared that "the problem of land reforms is fundamental to all development", and said:

"Under Land Reforms we include all measures designed to readjust the rights, obligations and arrangements connected with the ownership and use of land with a view to (achieving) greater productivity, higher living standards and improved social status and opportunities for those engaged in cultivation. The aims of land reforms are economic, but in a still greater and more pressing degree, they are also social and political. The structure of rights in land is not only a major factor in the growth of the national economy, but also a sine qua non for social stability and political progress of the country."

This extract from the Planning Commission's report (mid-'50s) is relevant to this day because it stresses the social need for land reform as much as it relies on its economic justification, a fact some present-day economic managers, unabashed apologists of the heresy of market-economy that they are, deliberately ignore while pleading that the time for land reforms has passed.

When Ayub Khan seized power in 1958 he had reason (concealing his assault on the people's right to self-rule) to overwhelm the nation with a display of zeal for reforms. Within a few days of getting rid of his benefactor (Iskander Mirza) he constituted a Land Reform Commission all of whose members were bureaucrats. They had considerable knowledge of land settlement and revenue affairs but their inability to appreciate the socio-political dynamics of land redistribution was no secret. The commission largely ignored the entitlements of landless cultivators. It also rejected Ghulam Ishaq Khan's note of dissent that subsequently received heavy endorsement from a group of economists at the Pakistan Development of Economics (PIDE).

The Ayub regime's land reform (1959-60) fixed a very high ceiling on land ownership (500 acres of irrigated land per head) and made generous provisions for exemptions (orchards, etc and even an allowance for use of tractor). All leading economists agreed that the land taken away from landlords constituted a tiny part of the total cultivable area, that the landlords benefited more from the exercise than the landless cultivators, and that the facilities for intensive and mechanised farming provided by the government made landlord-tenant relationship more adverse for the latter than before.

A decade later, it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's turn to take up the rhetoric of land reform. Announcing his land reform programme within three months of picking up the debris of the state he declared:

"We are as much against the ignorant and tyrannical landlord as we are against the robber barons of industry. We are as much for the creative and humane landowner as we are for a productive and conscientious owner of industry… I cannot nationalize the land. It's not possible. At the same time, I can't allow bigger estates to remain. I must cut them down so that production increases.."

The land reform of 1972 reduced the ceiling on land holding to 150 acres of irrigated land per head (not family). But if Ayub's land reforms had been subverted by pro-landlord bureaucrats, something similar was done by the feudals surrounding Bhutto. Nobody can possibly miss the fact that from 1949 to 1972 any declaration of intent to help the landless out of their misery was prefaced with a tribute to the creative and humane landowner who could order the patwari to confer on him the title of a progressive self-cultivating farmer.

Bhutto made another attempt at land reform. In January 1977 before calling for a general election he announced a new reform package under which the ceiling on land holding was reduced to 100 acres of irrigated land and land revenue on holdings of upto 25 acres was abolished. Ziaul Haq and the new landlords among his rufaqa made sure that the 1977 land reform was not implemented. It has been argued that the withdrawal of exemption from reform earlier allowed to military officers' land holdings added a strong reason to the Zia group's decision to overthrow Bhutto. However, after the 1977 coup many politicians, including some leading members of the PPP, joined the scramble to undo land reforms and recover the lands that had been given to peasants. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa these landlords used police and private gunmen to seize lands.

In the subsequent years religion was invoked to put an end to the debate on land reform. The feudals always had their allies among the conservative clerics who defended jagirdari with a doggedness worthy of a noble cause. But they could not do much to prevent land reforms until their capacity for pushing Pakistan back into the medieval period was enhanced by Ziaul Haq. Two ulema-judges joined hands with Justice Zullah in over-ruling the two regular judges of the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court to bar land reforms on the ground of the previous attempts having been un-Islamic.

No parliament has had the wisdom or the guts to undo the effect of the most unkindest cut dealt by the judiciary to the rights of the marginalised cultivators and landless tenants of the country.

And this in a country where lack of access to land and an exploitative landlord-tenant relationship is the principal source of rural poverty, according to Dr Akmal Husain.

The story of land reform was best summed up by Iqbal:

Despite introduction of land reforms by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1959 and twice by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972 and 1977, the objectives of the move could not be achieved. A historical review of these reforms reveals that the influential landlords who enjoyed power in the government hampered their implementation to suit their own purposes.

To start with, the 1959 land reforms allowed landlords to own and cultivate up to 2,000 acres of irrigated or 4,000 acres of non-irrigated land -- that is, if they took certain measures which included transfer of individual landholdings to legal heirs and conversion of chunks of land into orchards, nurseries and game preserves.

As a result, huge tracts of land remained in individual ownerships as landlords transferred land in the names of their family members, including women. Feudals, who enjoyed immense influence on the peasants, also transferred land in the latter's names. Such transfers were on paper only, as practically the control over such lands lay with the landlords. Similarly, the landlords subdivided their landholdings into parts by declaring them reserved for orchards, nurseries and game preserves.

A major objection to the 1956 land reforms was that the limit was placed on individual holdings and not on family ownership. Former president, late Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then secretary for development and irrigation in West Pakistan, opposed the idea of imposing land ceiling on individual holdings. His point was that the net effect of the proposed measures would leave the concentration of land in families instead of individuals. Ishaq, who was part of the committee on reforms, also opposed exemptions like those given for orchards or transfer of land by gift.

While presenting its bill, MQM has also held the land revenue department officials, tehsildars and patwaris responsible for helping out landlords in keeping fertile lands within their families after the introduction of the 1956 land reforms. This they did, according to the political party, by making false entries in the official land records.

The MQM bill also proposes that all land within the territorial limits of provinces, owned, leased, occupied, tenanted, encumbered, mortgaged with or without possession by any person, should be resumed in the name of the provincial government.

Similarly, the 1972 and 1977 land reforms introduced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto failed to achieve the desired result. "Though Bhutto was a great proponent of socialism, the chief ministers of Punjab and Sindh-Sadiq Qureshi and Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi were big-time feudal landlords who did not want the plan to succeed," claims Farooq Tariq, an office-bearer of Anjuman Mazarieen Punjab.

Farooq, who has worked with late Sheikh Rashid, Chairman of the Federal Land Reforms Commission in Bhutto's regime and edited the latter's book, says the land reforms could only be implemented in Swat, Dir and other parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The same could not be implemented in Balochistan as the sardars did not let their control lose at all, he adds quoting Rashid.

Farooq tells TNS that Rashid shared his experiences of those days with him. "He said he was often warned of grave dangers to his life in case he wanted to visit an area for review of landholding situation there. In many cases, even the peasants who were the major stakeholders, were forced to request the irrigation minister not to visit their area due to threats of violence."

Farooq says that former president Farooq Leghari's 60,000 acres were highlighted under the land reforms plan but he approached the court and got relief on the ground that land reforms were unIslamic.

A final judgment by the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court, issued on August 10, 1989, in Qazalbash Waqf v. Chief Land Commissioner (PLD 1990 SC 99) case, also gave a blow to the idea of land reforms. The lead judgment, written by Mufti Taqi Usmani, held that the right to land in Islam is absolute, that Islam has imposed no quantitative ceiling on land or any other commodity that can be owned by a person, that any such limits are prohibited by the Sharia, that a temporary limit may be imposed in times of emergency, that illegitimately acquired land is illegitimate and that forceful acquisition of land is haram.

Another reason for the failure of 1977 reforms was the resistance shown by religious organisations and political parties. The said reforms had withdrawn the provisions of land exemption provided to religious institutions. This led to strong protests from those affected who took the issue to the court which declared land reforms unIslamic.

Bhutto also abolished exemptions given to orchards, stud farms, etc and introduced the concept of setting up landholding limit on the basis of the Produce Index Unit (PIU) which was a measure of the productivity of land in question.

One of the legacies of the British colonial administration system across the subcontinent was a semi-feudal, tenant-landlord-land nexus that centred on intermediaries. This small group of intermediaries (or zamindars) had amassed enormous swathes of land, ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 acres, under the British colonial rule since 1793, when the British popularised the zamindari system over the existing jajmani relationship with the introduction of land tax under the Permanent Settlement Act.

Though the jajmani system was not essentially just, it still ensured a community based system of division of labour and reciprocal exchanges of goods and services amongst the members of the various castes that aimed at mutual gratification.

The push towards land reforms had been generated much earlier, in the early 1920s, when the peasantry had initiated a rebellion against the severe exploitation by the zamindars and the British Administration in the form of levying high tax rates and threatening the occupancy of the small farmers. The government of the newly independent India set about acting upon a national agenda for rural reconstruction as enshrined in the country's constitution. Indian land reforms adopted a three-pronged approach in successive five-year plans that revolved around the abolition of intermediaries, ensuring protection to tenants and regulation of tenancy and the imposition of ceilings on the size of land holdings.

Up till the mid-'50s, the emphasis was on the first aspect of the national land reform agenda, and the zamindari system of land acquisition upon the basis of bidding for collecting the highest tax rates by the intermediaries from the farmers was subsequently dismantled. However, the concurrent system of ryotwari that entailed the collection of land revenue directly from the Ryots or land-tillers by the government remained intact in more than 50 percent of the country's entire occupied land.

The subsequent stages of Indian land reforms concentrated upon the imposition of ceilings on land possession. Ceiling levels were assigned upon the basis of a typical family unit consisting of 5 members, i.e. a husband, a wife and their 3 minors. The ceiling levels varied from state to state and were different for dry, good or inferior quality land as well as that which produced either one or two crops. The range of land possession was from around 4 to 54 hectares. Exemptions were made upon land used for non-agricultural industrial and commercial activity or held by religious and charitable trusts, albeit to the discretion of the State governments. The surplus land was, thus, redistributed with priority to landless former tenants and members of scheduled castes, against compensation to be made in multiples of land revenue. In the first 50 years, around 7.4 million acres was declared surplus of which more than 5 m has been redistributed to approximately and equivalent number of beneficiaries.

However, critics such as Manpreet Sethi, a senior research fellow at the Center for Air Power Studies at New Delhi, have argued that the Indian land reforms were manipulated by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF to serve their own commercial and industrialisation goals.

About two months back, The New York Times carried an interesting piece on Jamshed Dasti that turned out to be more of an analysis of how feudal power is waning in a fast urbanising Pakistan. Dasti, a "mongerel" and a "scrappy son of an amateur wrestler", managed to defeat the wealthy feudal classes to win the parliamentary seat on the strength of his personal clout, not once but many times over. Local residents, writes NYT, like to call him "Rescue One-Five, a reference to an emergency hot line number and his feverish work habits."

The strength of his performance in the constituency was such that a virulent media campaign against him for carrying a fake degree could not discourage his voters and Dasti won the byelection once again.

But, are feudals indeed a dying breed?

It appears there is no middle ground as an answer. Those who think feudals have lost their political and economic clout are convinced this has been achieved conclusively and we are currently living in an industrial age that mixes perfectly with capitalism. Or that capitalism dominates agriculture, too. Others differ radically. Feudal class still dominates, they think.

There are, of course, conflicting developments that mar each of these analyses to suggest that the truth may lie somewhere in between. One, feudals do not alone carry the mantle of wealth and influence because mercantile, business, industrialist and trader classes have come to share it with them. Two, we are seeing neo-feudals in industrialists who are buying agricultural land to achieve some kind of 'social power' which is impossible to enjoy in urban centres. And finally many of the landowners of yore now have industries alongside.

Political analyst and academic Rasul Baksh Rais thinks the economic clout of the feudal class did get fragmented because of the inheritance law but the social powers of the family did not. "The dominance of the feudal class sustains because of various reasons. The British gave land to people who were caste or tribal leaders. Earlier, the Mughals gave them land because they wanted to subcontract authority to influentials."

According to Rais, their social base already existed because of their capacity to extract revenue, control population etc. "The land settlement in the late 19th century under the British rule changed the land tenure system of the Mughals. The Mughals did not distribute land on hereditary grounds. They gave land according to the social capacity and role of individuals in the Mughal Empire. The British, on the other hand, gave permanent settlements."

Feudalism has not sustained because of their wealth or land or even their social base, says Rais. "It has sustained because of the landowners' control over district administration, transfers, appointments and development funds. It has sustained because of state patronage. The industrialist sits in the urban areas and gets his work done by paying money. The feudal, on the other hand, keeps the state subordinate."

For journalist Suhail Warraich, feudalism is a thing of the past. "Feudalism was the name of a social structure when feudals could influence the police and the jirga etc. There was no bureaucracy or judiciary. But today we have these institutions and people have become more rebellious."

Warraich holds that no one wants to retain feudalism. "It was a system of the past and it had to end. As the lands continued to be divided, the stature and power of the feudals also dwindled."

Rais, on the contrary, thinks the feudal class still dominates "because now even the mid-level landowner in Punjab and Sindh is quite powerful, not because of the quantity of acreage but because of the increase in the price of agricultural commodities." Their wealth has increased manifold because of their orchards and cash crops, he thinks.

An interesting juxtaposition of this view may be made with the landowners' claim how they have been impoverished over the years. The entire country blames them for not paying the agriculture tax but they say that the markets forces and the middlemen take all the money.

While the veracity of this claim may be difficult to ascertain, Rais is adamant that feudalism thrives because of the way our parliamentary system is structured. It depends on legislatures and the legislature influences the executive. "This is the reason why feudals are still effective and as a consequence the bureaucracy has been weakened."

But is parliament indeed the decision-making body, considering the powers enjoyed by some other pillars peculiar to our state? Rais thinks indeed it is, though the problem is that "party bosses take decisions instead of legislators."

In Suhail Warraich's view "it is important to understand who is doing the decision-making in Pakistan. There is no feudal in the military or judiciary or bureaucracy."

The truth, says Warraich, is that the only meaningful land reforms in this country were effected by "a feudal Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself and not the military or an industrialist".

If we have already seen the end of feudalism, who are these neo-feudals in the garb of industrialists and why is it important for servicemen to get agricultural land at the end of their careers? "You see, agriculture involves an element of pleasure. Industrialists want to have agricultural land and horses and cows and there's nothing wrong with it and this is happening elsewhere in the world. Whoever has money wants to relax," says Warraich.